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The Ups Song

Here's "Just One More Hack" - The "ups song" in mp3 format - just right click on
the link and select "Save":
Just One More Hack

The Impetus

My first job in the University Kent was working for a small group of
programmers, known as The Kent Koftware Tools Group. Our enviable
task was to embrace the new technology that was emerging at the
time - computer workstations with a mouse and pixel-addressable screen
- to create software with a novel, interesting, and powerful user
interface. This was initially on ICL Perqs and later on the first
Sun Workstations.

A friend and colleague of mine, Mark Russell, was working on a new
debugger. He'd been working on ups (for that was its name) for quite
some time, but he'd never got around to releasing it. There was
always a new feature, some new functionality that absolutely had to be
added before it could be released to the world. After a while this
started getting silly, and so for a laugh I wrote a song entitled
"Just One More Hack and I'll Put It on the Net" to see if I could
chivvy him along.

The Song

It worked, and within a few months ups was released to the world.
The song itself did well in its own small way. I placed a low-quality
mono ulaw encoded copy of the song onto a well-known FTP site (this
was before mp3 was popular, and before the Web was invented :-) and
from there it propagated around the world. Later, it even found its
way on to the rare and collectable (grin) CD
"MUSENET 1992" - a
collection of songs written and performed by Usenet Artists. Here's a
quote (originally from me) on that page:

``Just One More Hack [and then I'll put it on the net]'' - Mark
Wheadon

This song was originally written to shame Mark Russell, the
author of the ``ups'' debugger, into releasing ups to the world. For a
couple of years he had been adding extra features, and ups was
constantly in a state of needing ``just one more hack'' before it
could be released.

When I asked him recently if the song made any
difference he replied ``Difference? The whole reason for sending the
bloody thing out was to stop you humming that tune!''

The song even made it into some ups distributions (in the lib
directory :-), and is mentioned at the ups sourceforge site.

Strangely, years on, I was part of a formal job interview panel here at
the Computing Laboratory of the University of Kent at Canterbury,
when one of the interviewees - on hearing my name, and in mid
interview - sang me a couple lines of the "ups song" - which was a
surreal experience.

As I still get requests for a copy of this song from time to time, and
so far as I know it isn't available elsewhere, I've placed a link to
an mp3 file of the song at both ends of this page. After all, it's not every day
someone writes a song about a debugger :-)

The Means

The song was recorded, pretty much live, using an old Teac 4-track,
which allowed me to record up to four tracks onto a conventional audio
cassette,
at double speed, using both "sides" of the tape at once, and listen to
the other three tracks whilst doing so.

I say, "pretty much live" because it's difficult to do a fully live
recording when you're doing all four of the parts :-)

The Lyrics

In case you can't quite hear the beautifully enunciated lyrics (grin),
here they are in glorious ASCII:

Well, I've written a debugger and it suits me just fine
it'll chase away your problems, turn your water into wine
it's got so many features, in fact it's bloody clever
if it can't solve your problem then your problem probably never can be solved
so you might as well pack it on in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.

It's got everything you wanted, everything you desire
it'll handle fancy structures, set your soul on fire
it'll indirect through pointers, and catch a falling star
and if you ask it nicely it'll pop off to the bar and tell your friends
how to solve the problems they're in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.

So if you've got a nasty problem and your data structure's bent
and your pointer's in a tangle with your structure elements
if you're losing all your memory coz your allocator leaks
and your girl's getting nasty coz she's not seen you for weeks
then stoke up Mark's debugger and you know it'll win,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been....

The Download

Here's "Just One More Hack" in mp3 format - just right click on
the link and select "Save".